Lumo or Dynamics 365: a CRM without a heavy project

Dynamics 365 Sales is part of a large Microsoft family. There are separate parts for sales, customer service, marketing and ERP, and they share a data platform. With Power Automate you build processes, with Power BI you analyse, and with Power Apps you create your own screens. In Outlook and Teams you see CRM data next to your mail and your conversations. For an organization that runs fully on Microsoft, that is a logical and strong route.

That strength asks something in return. A Dynamics implementation usually runs through a Microsoft partner, and the configuration is so broad that someone often needs to look after the platform. For a B2B team of ten to a hundred people that mainly wants to sell, serve customers and send campaigns, that is sometimes more platform than needed.

Lumo is a product. You configure it in settings, without code: pipelines with win probability, custom fields, roles, data-quality rules and automations. The helpdesk, campaigns, forms, live chat and quotes share the same database. You switch fourteen modules on or off per workspace.

And your mail client? Gmail and Google Calendar sync today. The Outlook and Microsoft 365 integration for mail and calendar is planned. What already works today for Outlook users: the personal BCC address, which works with any mail client, logging mail by hand, and every other part of Lumo, which does not depend on your mail client. Sales Surge has done more than 150 CRM implementations, including for teams on Microsoft 365. Below we go through the themes.

Pipeline and leads

Dynamics has opportunities with extensive sales processes you can configure step by step. Lumo keeps it to a deal board you understand in a few minutes. Every stage has a win probability and a limit in days after which a deal is marked as stalled. You see count, value and weighted value per stage, and every stage change is stored with its duration. If you want to enforce a step, you switch on a rule that blocks the save when a required field is empty. The Today screen puts tasks, leads, stalled deals and tickets close to breaching in one place.

Email and calendar for Microsoft users

Dynamics lives in Outlook. Lumo syncs with Gmail and Google Calendar today, and the Outlook and Microsoft 365 integration for mail and calendar is planned. Until then, this is how you work. Every user has a personal BCC address. Put it in Bcc on a mail from Outlook, or forward a mail to it, and it lands on the right person, organization and deal, without becoming a ticket. You can also log mail by hand. You plan activities such as calls, meetings and tasks in Lumo's own calendar, with a list and a calendar view where you can drag.

Quotes and signing

In Lumo you create the quote on the deal. Lines come from the deal products with quantity, price, discount and billing frequency. The customer signs with a typed name and a six-digit code sent by email. The signed PDF gets an evidence page with time, IP address, device and a SHA-256 hash, and every step sits in a hash-chained audit log. What you should know: quote documents are in Dutch, and it is not a qualified electronic signature.

Service

In the Microsoft family, customer service is a separate part. In Lumo the helpdesk is part of the same product. Tickets move through New, Open, Pending, On hold, Solved and Closed. There are SLA targets per priority with business hours, holidays and a warning at 75 percent. Customers sign in to the portal with a passwordless link, and the knowledge base has Dutch and English articles. Every organization gets a health score from 0 to 100.

Marketing

Marketing is a separate part at Microsoft too. In Lumo email campaigns and web forms are part of the product. You send to segments from your filters, consent is checked again at the moment of sending, and an unsubscribe applies to the whole workspace. Campaigns go out through our sending service from a sender domain you verify with a DNS record, so they do not depend on your own mailbox.

Automation and reporting

Dynamics automates through Power Automate and reports through Power BI. Lumo has both built in. Automations react to triggers such as deal won or lead stale, check conditions, and create an activity, note, field update, owner or label. They deliberately do not send email, and you can dry-run them first. The report builder has nine chart types, goal lines, periods including fiscal year, drill-down and CSV export. If you still want to analyse in Power BI, you pull data through the REST API or a CSV export.

AI

Microsoft builds Copilot across all its products. The Lumo AI assistant works inside Lumo. It searches, creates and updates records, and builds segments, campaigns, automations and reports. Anything outward-facing or irreversible waits for your approval. It runs with your role, is off per workspace until an admin switches it on, and runs on Google Gemini by default.

Data and security

In Dynamics you sign in with your Microsoft account. Lumo has its own login with two-factor authentication through an authenticator app, which you can make mandatory for admins, and a list of sessions you can sign out remotely. There are four roles, every table is separated per workspace, and the audit log is append-only. For GDPR you export or erase everything about a person. Data is hosted in London. Signing in with Microsoft or other SSO is not available. Read more about security and privacy.

Implementation and switching

There is no automatic import from Dynamics. Sales Surge moves your accounts, contacts and opportunities by hand to organizations, persons and deals, and sets up pipelines, fields and roles. Read how we approach implementation and onboarding.

Dynamics 365 is genuinely strong on a few points, and we are happy to say so.

• Woven into Microsoft 365. CRM data in Outlook and Teams, documents in SharePoint, analysis in Excel.
• The Power Platform. With Power Automate, Power Apps and Power BI you build processes, screens and analyses on the same data.
• ERP in the same family. Sales, finance and logistics from one vendor. Lumo has no ERP.
• Sign-in with your Microsoft account. One account for everything. Lumo has its own login.
• Scale and configuration. Built for large organizations with their own processes and their own admin team.
• Mobile app. Lumo is a web app.

If you need ERP and CRM together, or build many of your own processes in the Power Platform, that is where Dynamics shines.